David Malouf - The Great World

The other kids at school held their noses when he appeared. Pooh! they went, even the ones he was mates with. He flashed out but his spirit squirmed. He loved his mother and hated to feel ashamed of her. His father was another matter. There was nothing anyone could do about him .

All this he bore in silence, he was proud; and they were all outcasts, more or less, the kids like him who lived along the railway and down the dunes.

He wasn’t by nature morose. The brightness of his blue eyes and their steady gaze, his quickness and sturdiness of limb, belonged to a disposition that was meant to be sunny. He should have moved easily in the world. But circumstances had taught him to hold back. Indirectness, an intense secretiveness about all that mattered most, had become second nature to him, the first surviving in an assurance, which belonged to his physical side, that the world must some day lay itself at his feet, though he was pretty certain now he would have to force it to.

As for the ready smile and liveliness of manner that came so easily to him, they could leave you vulnerable, he had discovered, unless used as a mask. They disarmed people. That was their use.

He ought to have been without hope. But his body was hopeful and he trusted it. Everything he did he looked forward to with an eager impatience. As a little lad he would come rushing in from play and suddenly stop dead on the doorstep, wondering, now he had arrived, why he had been in such a hurry to get back; as if he had expected the house to have changed while he was away. His mother saw the look on his face and it went right through her.

When he examined the world he was in he could only assume that an error had been made in the true workings of things. He was harmed by this. It would make life hard for him. But he intended to rectify the situation any way he could and would have no mercy on whatever it was that had sought to rob him of his due.

Standing still out there in the fading light and knowing that the moment he went in his eyes would lose their capacity to follow the flight of a ball or catch a disturbance in the grass, he would try to keep contact with the animal part of him, trusting to that , and would feel his whole body come to the edge of something — something he could have too, if he could only grasp what it was.

Here, at the smoky edge of darkness, even stones lost their sharp edge and their heaviness a moment and seemed ready for flight. He felt his body leave the earth. That was the animal in him, which was sure-footed and had perfect timing. It took off in a long leap and he held his breath.

The land breeze had fallen, just on the turn. Everything was suspended, hanging for one last moment between daytime and night, between its day life and that other darker life of the night hours. His body too was suspended.

But after a moment of almost miraculous lightness in which he felt he had actually done it, and worked the change, he came back to earth. The weight of his body, light as it was, reclaimed him. It was too heavy to shake off.

The sea breeze quickened and in kitchens all down the shore they would be feeling its coolness now. His eyes had adjusted. The lights were hard window-squares.

‘Maybe,’ he thought grimly, ‘there is no other life to be broken through to. It’s all continuous, and you just keep getting thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier as it builds up in you, and that’s it .’

He thought this but could not believe it. That sort of fatality was not in his nature. He would sigh and go home disappointed, but not hopeless, never entirely without hope.

Mornings, out early to fetch the milk, he would see the local men gathering at bus stops on their way to the mine. Other fellows from villages down the coast would be on bikes and would call to them as they passed. Happy enough they seemed, with their little lunch-boxes. They were the lucky ones who still had work. The rest, unshaven, in pyjamas some of them, would be pottering about behind fences, digging a bit, keeping busy. Later, still unshaven but dressed now in collarless shirts and braces, they would be hanging about in groups outside the pub, quiet enough till they got going. Horses were what they were passionate about, or greyhound races or football teams.

At the weekends you could see them, in the same groups, walking to matches with their hands in their pockets. Younger blokes in flash suits, their girls in stockings and high heels, would be stepping along beside them, occasionally calling across to a fellow they knew, or the girl would call to a neighbour she recognised. They would have a fifth share in a lottery in their pocket, these youngsters, maybe a frenchie just on the off-chance.

‘Doin’ all right, are yer?’

That question from an older man, with just a touch of envy in it, would satisfy in most of them the need for recognition.

‘Can’t complain,’ was the conventional, understated response.

A raw, scrubbed look, hair cut short around the ears and palmed down with California Poppy, a suit. Kids like Vic, still barefoot, in an old knitted jumper with a hole at the elbow from leaning on a desk, were supposed to be impressed by that and to catch in it a hint of what they too might step into, if they did what they were told, stayed on the right side of the law, and the Depression ended.

Vic considered this and didn’t think much of it. He would make his own life, not just pick up what was passed on to him. He would. He knew it.

His father was a miner, or had been till an old war wound asserted itself — ‘came good’, as the cynics put it. He had a pension and spent his days now, winter and summer, down at the jetty where the coal-loaders put in and there was always a little crowd of men lounging about or casting a line for whiting. There or in one of the town’s three pubs.

He was a well-set-up dark fellow with the same blue eyes Vic had (Vic resented this, whatever value they might have in the way of foxing people), and a natural slovenliness in all he did that affronted the boy. It was to assure himself of the impossibility of there being any link between them that Vic tormented his spirit into hardness and punished his skin with the scrubbing brush.

Easy-going — that was the word for him. They had both been easy-going, Dan and Till Curran, in the days when he was still in work and she was a big woman who liked a beer or two and a hand of poker. They had friends all over. Vic was little then, but he remembered Marlin Street and the rowdy nights.

His father now was a byword in the town. A drunk and a scrounger, he was always dancing about on the edge of whatever crowd there was at the Pacific or the Prince of Wales, and there was a point in his booze-sodden day — Vic had been witness to it more than once, and could not, young as he was, wipe out the horror of it — when he would, with a show of clownish good humour, easy-going as ever, do whatever was demanded of him so long as there was a beer at the end of it: run messages for people, tell tales, swallow insults — always with a silly smile on his face and a fawning eagerness to make himself agreeable.

He had no shame, and it amused some of the smart-alecs of the town, a good many of whom had no shame themselves, to see how far he would go. With a mixture of low pleasure and fascinated disgust, a touch of fear too at what they might have in common with him, they would taunt him with insults, amazed that he should just stand there smiling, blinking, and make no effort to defend himself.

He would do anything, Dan Curran, if he was far gone enough. Lick up your spit and thank you for it, laughing. Then swallow his schooner at a gulp.

There were others, decent men who had worked in the pit with him or been in the same class at school, who felt humiliated themselves to see a man with so little regard for himself.